September 2018
CHAPTER 1
Despite what some people think, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. For some reason, people always have the impression that I come from a very wealthy family. The truth is, we were always on some sort of economy drive, although my mother did her best to ignore that. My dad, John Metcalf Smith, had a small garage in Rathmines and in the early days, when there were very few cars on the roads, there was not a great deal of business. But he was a good, kind man and people took to him and the clients he had were loyal. My dad was a Methodist and he had what I call the Protestant ethic: hard-working, reliable and straight as a die. My mother, Jane, was a Catholic, and as well as the religious divide, there was little else they had in common. As it was a mixed marriage, the ceremony took place on the side altar of the church in Dunboyne, County Meath. In the late 1920s, if a Protestant married a Catholic, a solemn promise was made whereby the children of the marriage would be brought up as Catholics. My father was scrupulous in this regard and every Sunday he dropped us all off for Mass and then went on alone to the Rathgar Methodist Church on Brighton Road.
My parents had three children in quick succession and I was the youngest of the family; Pamela was the eldest and Roger was the middle child. Pamela was beautiful, small and dark with lovely eyes. Dad’s mother and father were not happy with him marrying a Catholic. Once Pamela arrived, all that changed, because she was the most adorable baby. At school, she passed every exam with flying colours but she had no interest in clothes or fashion, much to my mother’s disappointment. When they went out to buy a new coat or dress, Pamela would have a book in her hand, and would barely look up when my mother asked her opinion on the item in question. Instead she just nodded her head and turned over the page. She always seemed to me to be totally self-contained; she did her own thing from a very early age. After leaving school, she went to London to study at a Montessori Teacher Training College. Pamela just wanted to get away, and who could blame her? Our home was not a peaceful one. My mother was constantly nagging and having tantrums and Dad seemed unable or reluctant to stand up to her; he adored her.
Pamela, who never smoked or drank, died of cancer when she was 64. She had five children and lived near Seattle, in the USA, in a house overlooking the Puget Sound. My mother favoured my brother, Roger. Roger was lovely and, if he were around today, he and I would be great friends. Poor Roger died tragically of a heart attack at 42 years of age, when his wife, Jackie, was pregnant with their second child. When Roger left school, he helped Dad run the garage. But the way Roger wanted to run the business was totally different from my father. Someone would come in for work to be done and Roger would give an estimate and Dad would say, ‘No, no, he’s a good customer and maybe he mightn’t have the money.’ ‘Of course he’s a good customer if we don’t charge him,’ Roger replied. I might be a millionaire now if I hadn’t inherited my father’s lack of business acumen.
In the early days, one of my father’s customers was Jeff Smurfit, who owned a small business and rented a shed around the corner from Dad’s garage in Rathmines. Sometimes his truck would break down in the middle of the night and my father thought nothing of going out to help him, whatever the time of day, much to my mother’s annoyance. Mr Smurfit was always late paying his bills, which annoyed her even more. At the end of one month, the bill was particularly high and Jeff Smurfit made my father an offer: ‘Instead of paying the bill, I’ll give you half the business,’ he said. The business was a small box company, which wasn’t doing too well, and my mother didn’t like this idea at all and told Dad to refuse. Sometimes you miss the boat; Dad certainly did on that occasion – Smurfit’s is now a multibillion-dollar business. If only my dad had taken the chance with Mr Smurfit, if only he had let Roger run the business, if only … If ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands … you know that silly saying. My dad’s work ethic was to do an honest day’s labour without taking advantage of his customers. He lacked real business flair, however, and his heart often ruled his head, except when my mother got in the way.
Roger couldn’t work with my father – their ideas on how to run a business were totally different, but they both loved cars and competed in a few races without much success, I’m sorry to say. They didn’t have decent cars and despite the fact that he was a good driver, probably better than me, Roger never reached his potential. After practice he would be delighted to find himself in pole position and then in the race, after two or three laps, the car would blow up.
Roger took off to England to work for a Ford dealership and I never saw much of him after that. In their spare time, he and a friend of his drove around the countryside of Yorkshire, calling into farmhouses and cottages looking for clocks that didn’t work and offering to buy them for little or nothing. ‘Oh here, take it away, it hasn’t worked for years,’ people would say. They accumulated an assortment of clocks, which they tried to repair, not always successfully, and then sold them on at markets and to antique shops. Roger was a very good salesman and this was a nice little sideline for a while.
My wonderful dad taught Roger, Pamela and me to swim and drive when we were very young – ‘In case of emergencies,’ he said. We learnt to drive in a big old-fashioned Vauxhall and I was only 11 when I first got behind the wheel. I loved it from the off; I was so small that I had to sit on cushions to see over the steering wheel. Dad had bought a field in Old Bawn, Tallaght (one of his better ideas), and we would drive round and round on the wet grass. Little did I know at the time, but this experience was to come in useful years later when I drove in the Monte Carlo rallies over those icy roads in Europe.
My dad was right about emergencies, because learning to drive at such a young age came in very handy one day. I must have been about 13 when it happened. My mother and I were alone in the kitchen in our house in Rathfarnham. She had been washing dishes in the sink and with wet hands she tried to pull the plug of the electric fire out of the socket on the wall. In those days plugs weren’t earthed, and she screamed as she dropped to the stone floor, unconscious, still clutching the plug. I rushed to her side, pulled the plug from her hand and quickly decided I had to get her to a doctor. We had a telephone but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to ring for my father or an ambulance – I didn’t stop to think, all I was concerned with was getting help as soon as I could. I dragged my mother outside and somehow got her into the old Vauxhall parked in the driveway. The driveway was very narrow, barely the width of the car, and I bumped along, hitting the walls on either side. Somehow I managed to get out of the driveway, on to the steep hill and turn right.
I was in first gear as we chugged down to Dr Donald, who lived on our road in the first house over the bridge. He was just on his way out when we arrived and you can imagine his amazement when he saw me driving the car with my unconscious mother in the back. He gave her CPR and called an ambulance and gradually she came back to life. My mother wasn’t dead and the doctor congratulated me and assured me she was going to be all right. It was then I started shaking as the enormity of what I had just done overcame me. I left the car there and ran home.
We went most years to Bettystown, a small village on the coast in County Meath, for our holidays. It was lovely there – beautiful beaches and long, lazy days of doing nothing. My father loved golf and he played in all weathers. Thunderstorms didn’t bother him; he just didn’t seem to care as he had a most peculiar affinity with the elements. Mother said he could have been killed with a steel club in his hand and the lightning flashing. I was preoccupied with other things and got my first kiss on the beach in Bettystown from